Thursday, November 14, 2013

When I was a kid in the '70s, weather forecasting really wasn't very good, but sophisticated computer modeling has improved it much more than the human ability to gauge its accuracy. I'm not a meteorologist, but I did read a chapter in a book about it: Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise : Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don't (2012). And, of course, the great thing about weather forecasts is that their accuracy can easily by measured after the fact: here's a study which concludes another inescapable fact about human endeavours: you get what you pay for.